MALCOLM BRADBURY writer & critic | Fiction | Introductory Essay EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG INTRODUCTORY ESSAY – ORIGINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN THE BRITISH COUNCIL SERIES, CONTEMPORARY WRITERS, UPDATED 2010 David Lodge Like several English novelists before him, Malcolm Bradbury began his literary career writing humorous and parodic sketches of contemporary life in magazines like Punch. This literary apprenticeship left its mark on his novels and stories, which are notable for their sharp, witty and densely specific observation of contemporary manners and morals, fads and fashions. The fact that most of these fictions are set in the academic world or have academics as their principal characters does not limit their representativeness. Read in chronological sequence, they constitute a satirical social history of post-war Britain. They also reflect developments, seen through British eyes, in the two great empires of the second half of the 20th century, the American and the Soviet Russian, which Bradbury observed on his academic travels. These novels have a dimension of serious - indeed pessimistic - moral and philosophical reflection.

Every now and then the brittle, amusing social surface cracks open to reveal dark and disturbing depths: violence, treachery, madness, despair. Bradbury used the conventions of the "campus novel" to develop the combination of comedy of manners and moral seriousness which he found in the modern British novelists he most admired, E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh. He also learned from contemporary American writers - not surprisingly, in view of his academic specialization in American Literature. His first novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959) owed as much to the intellectually sophisticated fiction of Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow as it did to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954). Like Amis, however, and other British campus novelists, Bradbury also drew on a native tradition of robust farce that goes back to Fielding, Smollett and Sterne in the eighteenth century. Rather unusually for a young writer's first novel, Eating People Is Wrong has a 40 year-old hero, Professor Treece, Head of English at a provincial redbrick university.

This allows Treece to represent a theme that consistently fascinated Bradbury, the liberal's sense of being an impotent spectator of, and at times an involuntary collaborator in, the cultural decline which he observes going on around him. Treece finds the brash, socially mobile Britain of the 1950s, where university teachers vandalise the learned journals in their own common rooms, a distracting and demoralizing climate in which to cultivate beauty and truth, but fails to live up to his own high ideals. Succumbing irresponsibly to the charms of a pretty postgraduate, he drives an unstable but gifted student into madness and is punished by his own comically horrendous hospitalization in the last chapter. In Stepping Westward (1965), Bradbury dispatched a similarly weak liberal hero, a provincial novelist called James Walker, to be writer-in-residence on a campus in the middle of America, where he proves quite incapable of reading the political plot in which he becomes involved. Full of brilliantly epigrammatic dialogue and acute observation of British and American manners, Stepping Westward was an important transitional novel on the way to the masterly The History Man (1975).

Bernie Froelich, the sly plotter of Stepping Westward, who manipulates the innocent Walker to further his own interests, is a precursor of Howard Kirk, the machiavellian left-wing sociologist at the new University of Watermouth in the south of England, who finds that the plot of history according to Marx coincides neatly with his own desires for possession and domination of other people. It helps that the cultural and sexual revolution which started in the 1960s is now in full swing, discomposing Howard's accident-prone colleague Henry Beamish, the prim Scottish lecturer Miss Callendar, and the novelist himself, who makes a thinly disguised appearance towards the end of the story. Technically, this novel marked a major innovative development in Bradbury's work. There is no internalization in the treatment of character. The fictional discourse scrupulously restricts itself to the subtly cadenced representation of speech and behaviour, reported in a present tense that renounces any claim to wisdom after the event. The reader is compelled to make his or her own assessment of the ethics and motives of the characters, without having any privileged access to their thoughts or guidance from a reassuring authorial voice.

Dr Petworth, the much-travelled linguistics lecturer in Rates of Exchange (1983) resembles the weak liberal heroes of the first two novels. As the beautiful Slakan magic realist novelist Katya Princip tells him, he is not "a character in the world-historical sense". His very name is subject to ludicrous mutation - Petwurt, Prevert, Pervert etc,, -- on the lips of his hosts in the mythical East European Communist state, Slaka. This is a richly imagined synthesis of several Balkan and Slavic countries for which Bradbury invented a whole new language full of delightful verbal humour. Superficially, the fun is at the expense of the Slakans; on closer inspection they emerge with more credit and dignity from the story than their English visitor, who comes to accept that Katya Princip's tale about a young folk hero called Stupid is his own fable of identity. In a political climate where discourse is a matter of life and death, Petworth's professional tinkering with linguistic theory is made to seem dilettante.

By the time of Dr Criminale (1992) the Berlin Wall has fallen, Communism is dead, and a more fluid and confusing cultural world has evolved. Bradbury takes as his subject the international intellectual superstar, personified in a fictional character who reminds us of real thinkers like George Lukï¿½cs and Paul de Man. The structure of the novel is picaresque: Francis Jay, a young English arts journalist, is commissioned to research the life of Bazlo Criminale, omnipresent conference keynote speaker and versatile theorist of a multitude of disciplines, for a mooted TV documentary. But the man proves curiously elusive, and the closer Francis gets to his quarry as he pursues him round the globe the more darkly ambiguous Criminale's personal and ideological history, on both sides of the old Iron Curtain, appears. In the end we are invited to admire the dexterity with which he used his intelligence to survive the brutality of 20th century history.

Bradbury's last completed novel, To The Hermitage (2000), was a change of direction: a historical novel about the time the French philosophe Denis Diderot spent in Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great in 1773-4 , spliced with a satirical account of modern academics conducting a floating seminar about Diderot on a cruise ship bound for St Petersberg, narrated by one of them, who is obviously Malcolm Bradbury. Like Diderot, who imitated Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in his Jacques the Fatalist, the narrator of To the Hermitage teases the reader with witty Shandean digressions and metafictional jokes. Complex, ambitious, and many-layered, To the Hermitage must not be hurried if it is to be enjoyed. The moving description of Diderot's decline and death in this novel acquired an extra poignancy from the circumstance that Malcolm Bradbury died in the year it was published.

Among the literary projects he left unfinished was a large fragment of another historical novel about the French Romantic writer Chateaubriand, called Liar's Landscape (it is included in the posthumous collection of his writing published under that title in 2006). To the end of his life Malcolm was fascinated by the relations between fiction and truth, and looking for new ways to explore this theme. In concluding this brief survey, I refer to him finally by his first name alone, to gesture to a personal friendship and professional indebtedness too extensive to describe here. (I have written about it elsewhere, in the Afterword to Liar's Landscape.) © David Lodge The History Man: Amazon.ca: Malcolm Bradbury, Paul Shelley: Books 3.0 out of 5 stars Elegant sentences, iffy plotting. March 17 2016 By Doug Wykstra - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback Verified Purchase Extremely well-written, but the story is slight and the satire undeveloped. But the satire that exists is incredibly sharp and funny, and surprisingly still relevant for our times. Not bad for a 40-year-old book poking fun at a very specific social phenomenon.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Middle-Class Marxist March 14 1999 By A Customer - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback Bradbury exposes academic socialism by measuring it with its own values and dialectic. Howard Kirk, self-proclaimed revolutionary, is ridden to the core with the middle class values he campaigns against. The "History Man" of the title, he strives to avoid all change in his life despite his progressive stance. "The History Man" is biting satire of British university life, sparing no one, staff and students alike. The book is very funny, but there is nobody to like - just as the characters don't care what happens to each other, it is hard to care what happens to them. The humour is vicious, and if you've ever been part of an institution you won't stop laughing. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece of impossibly witty conversation Sept.

25 2015 By TChris - Published on Amazon.com Format: Kindle Edition I love novels that feature the kind of impossibly witty conversation that real people never have -- at least I'm not witty enough to have them and I don't know anyone who is. Maybe only the British have learned the art of witty conversation. Kingsley Amis and Malcolm Bradbury mastered the fictional witty conversation, which is one of the reasons I enjoy reading them. The History Man is a send-up of the conspicuously unconventional, studiously modern social science academic, newly imbued with the fashionably permissive attitudes of the 1960s. Set in the 1970s, The History Man is about life as performance, "self-made actors on the social stage." To the extent that it skewers self-styled radicals who have since fallen out of fashion in academia, it retains its relevance in its skewering of academics who care more about themselves than their students. Howard Kirk teaches sociology at a progressive college. His wife Barbara is involved in a variety of activities. The couple is well known and liked, in part because of their spontaneous willingness to open themselves to everyone they encounter (although their spontaneity is carefully stage managed).

Having achieved commercial success writing about "new" sex (what's new is that people are having a lot more of it with a greater variety of partners), Howard is enjoying the bourgeois benefits that he denounces. While condemning all forms of snobbery, Howard indulges in his own. His carefully cultivated image as a "free traveler through life" allows him to condemn colleagues who have put down roots, who are part of the establishment he seeks to destroy (but only if its destruction forms a foundation for his own success). He is also a confrontational rabble-rouser who manipulates others to assure that he can be confrontational without harming his job security. In fact, he bases his opinions not on reason or ideology, but on how much controversy the opinions will generate. Chicly radical in her own way, Barbara avoids employment by leading consciousness-raising sessions, organizing unions, and engaging in whimsical acts of community activism. Howard and Barbara love to talk, mostly about themselves.

For example, when Howard criticizes one of his friends for having gone bourgeois, Barbara smugly reminds him that "they haven't had all our disadvantages." They also love to give parties that celebrate freedom (from "economic timidity, sexual fear, and prescriptive social norms"), although the parties really celebrate Howard and Barbara's ability to give a party that others will appreciate and admire. Some of the novel's best passages consist of characters dissecting each other with scalpels made of wit, peeling away their superficial exteriors to reveal their hollow cores. Howard's friend Henry is the novel's most likable character. As he ages, he has come to value only "attachment to other knowable people, and the gentleness of relationship." For holding beliefs that are sincere and sentimental, poor Henry is mocked by most of the other characters. Another likable character, Miss Callander, manages to see right through Howard but succumbs to his charm anyway. The novel's most insightful moment comes when a student whose politics are markedly different from Howard's gives him a polite verbal thrashing. The reader might or might not agree with the student, but he raises a good point about the possibility of a professor's political bias affecting the perception of a student's academic efforts.

Howard's response, on the other hand, is petty, vindictive, and narrow-minded -- just like Howard. Howard wants to make his life interesting, an end he accomplishes by using deceit and guile and provocation and then stepping out of the way so he can enjoy the dramatic consequences before engaging in the academic version of gossip by discussing "interesting" problems with his analytical friends. The question in the reader's mind is whether all of Howard's disagreeable character traits will at some point backfire. I think most readers will root for that, while at the same time enjoying his roguish antics. Enjoying the witty conversations that pepper the novel, though, is the real reason to spend some time with Howard and his friends. Appended to the Open Road volume is a 1998 essay in which Bradbury discusses the novel and the rise and fall of sociology. Since that was my undergrad major (chosen because it was easy to get good grades without actually attending classes), I enjoyed his remarks. 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Life in Academia in the Early 1970s Sept.

4 2013 By Hector - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback I recently re-read The History Man, after first reading it almost 20 years ago. Although it feels a bit dated it reflects the reality of the cultural flux of the times and the political fervor in many academic settings in the early 1970s. Its trenchant satire of academic life at this time makes The History Man one of the best examples of the `campus novel'. Although its constant parody is humorous throughout, it lacks the laugh-out-loud provoking humor of parts of Changing Places by David Lodge or Mary Smetley's recent take on academic politics in Lorenzostein. Set in the University of Watermouth, a new `glass and steel' campus in the southeast of England, in the early 1970s, the story follows the course of a semester in the life of Dr. Howard Kirk, a young radical lecturer in sociology, and his wife Barbara. The novel is really a critique of modernity and of the socially with-it, manipulative, intolerantly politically correct and personally abusive ethos of his hero/anti-hero, Dr. Howard Kirk.

Although extremely well-written, the dialogue is quite dense and thus The History Man is not a quick or easy read. But, it is very well-worth the effort if you have any interest in the genre of the `campus novel' or a curiosity about the cultural tone in academia in the UK and the US in the early 1970s. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful 5.0 out of 5 stars Satire of 1970s academic life, still relevant today Dec 4 2014 By Sirin - Published on Amazon.com Format: Paperback This is a short, punchy campus novel that has not dated even though its themes are specifically relevant to the early 1970s when radical lecturers in the most modish of universities were pushing to keep the flame of late 60’s radicalism alive. Howard Kirk is a recognisable character to anyone familiar with university life in the past few decades – highly intelligent and almost entirely without moral scruple, he uses dialectics to justify the most egregious hypocrisies and misbehaviours.

His ruination of a student who wants to deliver his paper in the traditional fashion, dressed in the traditional manner of blazer and tie, is described to perfection. The legacy of the Howard Kirks, the Marxist sociologists, looms large in academic life today and Bradbury’s novel is well worth reading as a penetrating, incisive satire of the roots of this phenomenon. The History Man: Amazon.co.uk: Malcolm Bradbury: 9781447222811: Books Malcolm Bradbury Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Apple To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. or Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . Product details Publisher: Picador; Main Market Ed. edition (13 Sept.

2012) Language: English Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 1.7 x 19.7 cm Average Customer Review: Review ‘The funniest and best-written novel I have seen for a very long time’ Auberon Waugh ‘Grim wit, chill comedy and a fictional energy which is as imaginative as the tale is shocking’ A. S. Byatt Book Description By A Customer on 15 Sept. 2000 Format: Paperback A quarter of a century may have passed but Bradbury's work is still a brilliant - if now criminally neglected - portrait of the academic world. Set in a thinly disguised version of the University of East Anglia in Norwich in 1972 the novel depicts the life and activities of the popular but ultimately monstrous Sociology lecturer and Marxist poseur Howard Kirk. At times hilarious in its portrayal of the Kirks' thoroughly modern marriage and in detailing the appallingly tedious minutiae of office meetings the novel is at its most compelling in its portrayal of Kirk's ruthless thwarting of unfortunate and unfashionable Tory boy George Carmody 'the only student in the university with a trouser press' as Kirk cynically pigeonholes him.

Although perhaps dated in its depiction of an academic world where talk of "reactionaries" and espousal of Marxism was far more commonplace than it is today, the novel nevertheless remains a powerful lesson as to the dangers of allowing one philosophy to overwhelmingly dominate in any environment (lecturer and student alike crudely dismiss all views not to their liking as "reactionary" or "fascist") and also of the dangers of the potential for abuse of power by individuals in everyday life. An enjoyable academic classic to rank alongside the best of Kingsley Amis or David Lodge. The history man : a novel (Book, 1976) [WorldCat.org] by Malcolm Bradbury. Abstract: Humorous and biting satire of British university life in the 1960s and 1970s, where safely positioned bourgeois radicals reign. Howard Kirk is the trendiest of radical tutors at a fashionable university. Timid Vice-Chancellors pale before his threats of disruption. Reactionary colleagues are crushed beneath his merciless Marxist logic. Woman are drawn by his promiscuity. A self-appointed revolutionary hero, Howard always comes out on top. Reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first.

Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first. Tags Add tags for "The history man : a novel". Be the first. Similar Items Malcolm Bradbury - 必应 Malcolm Bradbury Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE (7 September 1932 – 27 November 2000) was an English author and academic. 多谢。 答 马尔科姆·布雷德伯里（SirMalcolmBradbury）：英国小说家和评论家，生于英国西约克郡设菲尔德。就读于莱斯特大学，后在那里执教，1970年成为东英吉利大学的美国研究和写作教授。外出旅行和学术上孜孜不倦为他的几部小说提供了素材，如《吃人是错误的》（1959）、《向西走》（1965）、《历史人物》（1975年，描述60年代的英国校园生活，后拍成电视系列剧，由Anthon... Malcolm Bradbury Life Bradbury was born in Sheffield, the son of a railwayman.

His family moved to London in 1935, but returned to Sheffield in 1941 with his brother and mother. The family later moved to Nottingham and in 1943 Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School, where he remained until 1950. He read English at University College, Leicester and gained a first-class degree in English in 1953. He continued his studies at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955. Between 1955 and 1958 Bradbury moved between teaching posts with the University of Manchester and Indiana University in the United States. He returned to England in 1958 for a major heart operation; such was his heart condition that he was not expected to live beyond middle age. In 1959, while in hospital, he completed his first novel, Eating People is Wrong. Bradbury married Elizabeth Salt and they had two sons. He took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull. With his study on Evelyn Waugh in 1962 he began his career of writing and editing critical books.

From 1961 to 1965 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the MA in Creative Writing course, attended by both Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983 and Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987. He retired from academic life in 1995. Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to literature and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to literature. Bradbury died at Priscilla Bacon Lodge, Colman Hospital, Norwich, attended by his wife and their two sons, Matthew and Dominic.

He was buried on 4 December 2000 in the churchyard of St Mary's parish church, Tasburgh, a village near Norwich where the Bradburys owned a second home. Though he was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's poem "Church Going". Malcolm Bradbury Works Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American. However, he is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although often compared with his contemporary David Lodge, a friend who has also written campus novels, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language.

In 1986 he wrote a short humorous book titled Why Come to Slaka?, a parody of travel books, dealing with Slaka, the fictional Eastern European country that is the setting for his novel Rates of Exchange, a 1983 novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode "Foreign Bodies" was screened on BBC One on 15 July 2000. His work was often humorous and ironic, mocking academé, British culture, and communism, usually with a picaresque tone.

The History Man[edit] Main article: The History Man Bradbury's best known novel,The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities – the British universities established in the 1960s which followed their "redbrick" predecessors. In 1981 the book was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth. Cuts[edit] Commissioned by Hutchinson as part of their Hutchinson Novella series, Cuts was published in 1987. It used a host of plays on the word "cuts" to mock the values of Thatcherist Britain in 1986 and the world of television drama production in which Bradbury had become involved after the adaptation of The History Man (by Christopher Hampton). Bradbury derided the philistinism of television executives who wanted to capture the market of Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown at impossibly low cost. He also explored the low esteem accorded writers in the hierarchy of television production.

Eating People is Wrong (1959) Writers and Critics: Evelyn Waugh (Oliver and Boyd, 1964) Stepping Westward (1965) The Social Context of Modern English Literature (1971) Possibilities (1973) Who Do You Think You Are? (1976) — a collection of short stories All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Go (1982) The After Dinner Game (1982) Rates of Exchange (1983) - includes description of a performance of the imaginary opera Vedontakal Vrop, also described in Why Come to Slaka? The Modern American Novel (1983) Why Come to Slaka? (1986) Cuts (1987) — a Hutchinson Novella Mensonge (1987) My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism's Hidden Hero (1987) No Not Bloomsbury (1987) Why Come to Slaka?

(1991) Doctor Criminale (1992) The Modern British Novel (1993) Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (1995) To the Hermitage (2000) Professor Malcolm Bradbury - Literature Literature Curtis Brown Group Ltd Biography Academic, novelist, screenwriter and playwright Malcolm Bradbury was born in Sheffield on 7 September 1932 and educated at West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham, the University of Leicester and Queen Mary's College in London. In 1959 he began a Ph.D. in American Studies at Manchester University, published his first novel, Eating People is Wrong, and began a distinguished academic career at teaching at Hull University. He taught English at the University of Birmingham in the early 1960s and began lecturing at the University of East Anglia in 1965 on English and American studies, setting up the acclaimed creative writing course with Sir Angus Wilson which has produced many eminent contemporary writers, including Booker Prize for Fiction winners Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Malcolm Bradbury was made Professor of American Studies in 1970, Emeritus Professor in 1995.Malcolm Bradbury was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, literary criticism and television plays and series. His most famous novels satirised university life, including The History Man (1975), winner of the Heinemann Award and adapted for television starring Anthony Sher as the Marxist lecturer Howard Kirk. Malcolm Bradbury was Chairman of Judges for the 1981 Booker Prize for Fiction, and his fourth novel, Rates of Exchange was shortlisted for the prize in 1983. His most recent novel To the Hermitage was published in 2000 and was considered by many critics to be his best work of fiction.Malcolm Bradbury lectured throughout the world and his books have been translated into many languages. He wrote many original radio and television plays, and adapted several novels for television including Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man.

His critical work includes The Modern British Novel (1994) and The Modern American Novel (1984).Malcolm Bradbury was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and was awarded a CBE in the 1991. He married Elizabeth Salt in 1959, with whom he had two sons, and lived in Norwich until his sudden death on 27 November 2000. Howard Kirk Facebook, Twitter & MySpace on PeekYou 1) Howard Kirk's Phone & Current Address View All Details 2) Social Media Profiles & More - Search Free! View All Details Howard Kirk's Phone #, Address & More View All Details Howard Kirk's Contact Info, Social Profiles & More View All Details Howard Kirk - Get Contact Information Phone Number Howard Kirk - Reverse Phone Search - Get Photos & Online Profiles Instantly!

Phone Number View Howard's Hidden Profiles on Facebook and 60+ Networks, howard****@gmail View Howard's Hidden Profiles on Facebook and 60+ Networks, howard****@yahoo View Howard's Hidden Profiles on Facebook and 60+ Networks, howard****@hotmail View Howard's Hidden Profiles on Facebook and 60+ Networks, howard****@aol View Howard's Hidden Profiles on Facebook and 60+ Networks, howard****@outlook MALCOLM BRADBURY writer & critic | Fiction | The History Man EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG WELCOME BACK TO THE HISTORY MAN – FIRST COMMISSIONED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, PUBLISHED IN LIAR'S LANDSCAPE Malcolm Bradbury Just over 30 years ago, I invented, for fictional purposes, a character who quite wonderfully turned into a long-lasting literary figure. His name was Howard Kirk, he was a radical university lecturer, and he appeared in a satirical novel called The History Man (1975).

Howard, the 'history man,' then took on a splendid new lease of life when, after Mrs Thatcher had come to power, he was played by a magnetic and Zapata-moustached Anthony Sher in the BBC-TV dramatization of the story. I say I invented Howard Kirk, and yet no character ever came my way more naturally. He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus – if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA. Most people then on campus knew a Howard Kirk. He was the easy-going left-wing lecturer from the Swinging Sixties who had seen it happen, seen it fail, and had to live through what came next: the Sagging Seventies. Always radical, always seductive, always seducing, he was eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he was himself 35. Howard believed in history, progressive history, and where it was inevitably leading us.

As he said, if you wanted to understand, you needed to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little history. Yet the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more 'trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. And sociology was the most fashionable, radical and popular of all subjects in the academic canon of the day. In new universities like mine it acquired special place, as one of those inter-locking, inter-disciplinary subjects that allowed us to widen and re-integrate the great map of learning. It united philosophy, political science, anthropology, economics, history, cultural and popular studies, literature and art in a spirit of quasi-scientific objectivity. It was high theory, the most conceptual of subjects – and yet it was data-based, empirical, very hands on. It was a master subject, offering an over-arching account of all social phenomena, entire historical epochs or ideologies – yet it was fascinated by the topical and the ephemeral. It was a 'value-free' approach to the world – yet it was also political. It stood beyond ideology, yet was a super-ideology.

Sociology had a glorious heyday in the Sixties and then began to fragment and die -- not as a discipline among others, but as the great discipline, the key to all knowledge. In this process it seems I played a part. In an interesting article in the January issue of Prospect, "Return of Sociology," Ian Christie, deputy director of the think-tank Demos, says the turning point was clear. It was the appearance of The History Man in 1975 that led to the backlash against sociology, when "Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city beseiged by Marxist academics." In fact I had no armies, and even I don't believe novels make that kind of difference. But out went the baby with the bathwater, says Christie, and sociology has not really recovered its authority since. ...... I would naturally be sorry to feel I alone had done such irremediable damage to a subject I respect and consider a major component of learning.

Sociology, I would be among the first to say, is a distinguished, historical, and very European form of study, whose origins go back to the Enlightenment – like much else that is good. It was shaped by great thinkers – Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Weber – and, for good or ill, has much to do with human progress and social understanding. Over the last two centuries, sociology sought to provide a comprehensive account of society, show models of how institutions work, compare ours and other societies. It studied class, race, gender and ideology. It considered how and under what determining influences people thought (sociology of knowledge) and how they believed (the sociology of religion). It explored suicide, alienation, anomie, sport and advertising. Yet something distinctive did happen to sociology between the 1950s and 1970s. The subject reached its heyday, particularly in Britain and the USA, and then quickly ran off into its decline. What must have become obvious to all parties was this was a sociological phenomenon in itself.

Why, then, did sociology achieve such a central role in Britain and the USA in the postwar years, and why did its pretensions collapse later? One explanation of the rise of sociology to its queen-bee role in the postwar map of learning was given by the left-wing American sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of influential books on the Power Elite and the Military-Industrial complex. In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, Mills claimed the sociological viewpoint was itself the product of the radical alienation that was one of the consequences of modernity. "Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps," the book begins. The modern individual came to see the world as "an outsider, a permanent stranger." Individuals cease in the modern mass to feel like individuals; they feel themselves as part of a process, a mob.

They struggle to understand the history in which they're trapped, but it is beyond comprehension: "The history that now affects every man is world history." Mills proposes the 'sociological imagination' as a form of what we would call, in another hideous word culled from the wreckage, 'empowerment.' He was offering, in a sense, a form of Marxism without a manifesto, a social critique in the form of a science, a view of history where history already is powered with a well-guided sense of where it's supposed to go. Mills was right: his age had turned to the sociological viewpoint. It was the time of the embracing cultural analysis, the handy social textbook. Postwar society was different from pre-war, and required new reporting. In Britain, at this time, Richard Hoggart was publishing The Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, the New Left analyzing such forces of social change as youth culture, sport, pop music. In the Fifties USA popular sociology flourished, as if the New World was being discovered anew.

In the early 1950s David Riesman had published his remarkable study The Lonely Crowd, identifying a quite changed American identity in the age of urban mass society. Other key studies – such as Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders – portrayed Americans as docile, in the hands of commercial manipulators, deceived by their own leaders, driven to conformity and social consent. The 'sociological' reading of postwar society came after the massive crisis of world war and the growth of a new era of ideological conflict, the Cold War. The mid-century crisis left earlier political thought discredited: Fascism disgraced, Marxist theory in a state of Stalinist stupefaction. Ideology itself was challenged, yet the intellectual apparatus of ideology – the study of society, class and politics – was in demand. All over Europe, old societies were being reconstructed with new political orders. Old balances of power and borders of empire had collapsed. Newly emergent post-colonial societies were multiplying, some fledgling democracies, some various forms of peoples' republic.

Above all, a new social order based on commodified mass capitalism was evolving in conflict with an opposite order, and the world was being rapidly transformed by economic and ideological forces that were constantly in conflict. The Sixties Revolution was itself a confused radical paradox: Marxist utopian dreams were somehow to be financed by endless bourgeois wealth. It was never consistent, and both succeeded and failed. The great sociological syntheses of the 1950s and 1960s lost their inclusiveness and certainty. Society ceased to be the great wonderland and became, simply, the mess we're in. Popular radical sociology was an episode. It gave us much, not least the enquiring, relativistic spirit in which we now perceive our 'membership' in society. Despite the many claims it made, it did little to deepen or enrich the sense of society or social existence. The atomized, random, value-free, self-creating, hedonistic self of the Nineties is just as much the product of all that radical sociology as it is of some Thatcherite distrust of the very idea of society. Like most Enlightenment projects, the great enterprise became lost in its own ironies.

The idea that our cultural understanding needed to spread democratically from elite to popular culture has turned, in the hands of the media makers and programme controllers, into the great Nineties dumbing down. The ideological scepticism of the 1960s about the institution of the bourgeois family has given us the aimless modern household and the erosion of the ethical and self-responsible individual. In short, the radical, Marxizing, counter-cultural sociology of the 60s has largely provided much of the ideological and moral framework of postmodern consumer capitalism. Ian Christie suggests the time is ripe for a return to sociology, and proposes that the 'defeat' of the 1970s is being reversed. I hope he's right. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that a society that is heavy with social self-description and self-documentation is so bad at defining the larger level of its moral, familial and community dilemmas. In a number of recent books – he mentions Conversations with Anthony Giddens – Christie sees a return to serious debate about the nature and the workings of society.

Yet he also notes we do not yet have the enquivalent among contemporary sociologists to a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Jay Gould, the large thinking figures who construct a significant relationship with theory and practice for an entire discipline. As Christie sees, if sociology is to make its return, it will have to swim outside the think-tanks, and recover some of that grand intellectual energy that delighted us thirty years ago – when the likes of David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, Richard Titmuss and Jurgen Habermass could make us understand the power and wonder of the idea of society, the mysteriousness of history. Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage has been a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed – even if it was chiefly for his own advantage – in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment Project.

As for his recent books, The Prospects for the ECU, Or How Europe Got Rich has done well this Christmas, and so has his Brief History of Football. The history men are not often sociologists these days. As for me, the ones I read are the Linda Colleys, the Norman Davies, or the new theorists in genetics or earth science. The fact remains that, if Ian Christie can find the published evidence that can persuade me, I shall be as delighted to hail the revival of sociology as I was sad to attend its fall.

Question: Howard Kirk is the eponymous hero of which 1975 Malcolm Bradbury novel?
Answer: History Man